It's a good idea to plan your marketing campaigns well in advance to ensure that they are well thought out and that you can get everything prepared on time. Whilst doing this you have a great opportunity to get creative and have some fun. Creative campaigns are likely to attract more attention as well because they can be fun and interesting, making them more appealing to consumers.

'Tis the season to be jolly, and this goes for your business too! Doing small things to celebrate the festive season is a great way to show the heart of your business, make your staff feel good and help to attract and retain customers. Here are a few ideas:

Your brand can be a difficult thing to pin down and its value hard to gauge. Is it your logo, your reputation, or what people think of your products?

Your logo is the simplest way that you identify your business – the mark or symbol that you use for visual recognition. Your logo doesn’t sell or describe your business. It is merely the start of the branding process. It is not ‘the brand’.

Your branding is made up of everything you communicate from your business; your logo, the colours of your logo, your tagline, what you say, what you believe, the image of your staff, etc. When you are creating the brand image of your company, you need to take a lot of factors into consideration; it is not just about your own personal preferences and what your favourite colour is for your logo. Your branding is the way your company is presented to and perceived by anyone and everyone who is aware of it.

As we said in our last blog, your brand is so much more than just your logo. Now you have a bit more understanding of what branding is, you need to know how to make yours just right. What goes in to making a brand recognisable and memorable?

When we talk about branding, the thing that first comes to mind for most people is a logo. When asked to think about a famous brand they think of the brand name and the logo that goes with it. But, obviously, a company's logo is not the full extent of its branding, although it is a very important aspect of it. When asked to think about a famous brand, although the brand name and logo instantly pops into mind, the thought processes that go along with it are actually much more complex; perhaps without even realising it, you automatically connect certain messages, values and ideas to this brand as well. This is what is achieved by a good quality, well communicated brand.

If you still don't have a website for your business, then this blog will help you to decide what platform will be best for you to build it on. Whether you are attempting to create your own website from scratch or are hiring a web designer to build one for you, it's a good idea to understand a basic level of how your website will work, so that you can easily update it in the future.

What is your website there for? Its main purposes are to increase awareness of your business, make sure everybody knows what you do, and to ultimately convert your visitors into customers. An important part of your website's success in these areas is what it says, i.e. it's content.

I’ll start with the bad news. Search engine optimisation is not an exact science. Extremely complex algorithms are used to calculate how websites are ranked that the average person has no chance of understanding. On top of this the big search engine companies such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are constantly updating them so what worked for SEO 5 years ago is not relevant today.

Engagement is a way of measuring how well a website holds the attention of the people who visit it. It can be a difficult thing to measure and depends on the purpose of the website but generally you can use a combination of bounce rate, pages per visit, and duration of visit to give a good idea. Engagement will be affected by a number of factors and often takes a certain amount of trial and error to get right. Any prospect that visits your website will connect how it looks and the usability with the credibility of your business. These 3 tips will get you started with engaging your visitors and improving the usability and usefulness of your website.